Next Steps

If you’re still with me after that last post you are probably thinking to yourself – “Ok so I can send and receive messages from the NodeMCU, how exactly is this going to help automate the coop?” The answer is NodeRed.

NodeRed

In my next post I’ll cover adding the ability to sense the temperature and setting up Node-Red to automatically send messages on a time schedule to your NodeMCU.

Once we can send messages on a time schedule (and at any time we wish by accessing NodeRed) we can tell the NodeMCU do to certain tasks on receiving a message.

From this point forward, however, I wont be going as indepth as I did in the last post when speaking of code. When there are new ideas and concepts, I’ll briefly touch on them; however, there is a wealth of information at your fingertips online. I’ll still provide updates to our code and tell you where to place them. But, I’ll rely on your intuition and desire for knowledge to understand the actions taking place in the code.

From here out I will also be providing a list of materials you will need to complete each section. This is a rather large project. We are ambitious and with ambition will come failure at times so don’t be disheartened. There’s a perfect meme to explain the mind of programmers at times:

Everything I’ve shown you so far took lots of research and trial and error on my part to make it run. (And to be honest – I even had errors while creating it for the last post because I had to step back so far). Don’t give up, and always look at it as a challenge. Reward yourself when you’ve found solutions. And always look for other ways to do things.